Twitter: headlines and news.

 

Spanish version

Twitter launched an experiment that encourages people to read the news before retweeting it. They discovered that many people retweeted news without reading what  they were sending.  The result of the experiment was that a larger percentage of users were opening the links before retweeting. If they really  read the news deeply we will never know. 

I like twitter to learn about current affairs in real time and, especially, using Hootsuite that organizes the news for me.  However, the loud noise, metaphorically speaking, is often quite deafening. This competition of trying to post  the greatest toxic original tweet is exhausting to keep up with, but if you keep  out of it, It is a really interesting social network. There is a reflection published by Enrique Dans that I would like to share with you:

 

“The fact that a prompt was required to get users to open articles before sharing them should make us think: what do we do in social networks? Share what we think reinforces our points of view, even if we haven’t gone beyond the headline and the image that illustrates it? Do we share what we want people to think we have read? Or both? Is it any wonder that social networks have become a breeding ground for spreading rumors, fake news and campaigns of manipulation or misinformation?”.

If we share some information without checking its reliability , or not even reading it, something is wrong. According to Dans, it is  that attitude that makes it easier to spread fake news to the danger point.

 

And you, do you read the news before retweeting?